Elizabeth Is Missing, the debut novel by 26-year-old Emma Healey, which tackles dementia, "has been dubbed 'Gone Gran'," noted Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard, after Gillian Flynn's bestseller Gone Girl. Like that book, it "has the mysterious disappearance of a woman at its heart. Its publisher, Viking, will also be hoping it replicates Gone Girl's success: the company fought off eight rivals for the book and paid a six-figure sum." Urwin's verdict was that the novel is "charming but never cloying", though "the ending itself is a little anticlimatic". But other reviews were ecstatic. "Normally a well-observed, literary novel that accurately shows us ourselves by deepening our knowledge of what it is to be human cannot manage, as well, to be both a comedy and a thriller. Elizabeth is Missing, however, encompasses these genres and deserves prizes in all categories," judged Philippa Perry in the Independent: "we have two main themes. How it feels to experience dementia, and a page-turner of a detective story. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be "beautiful". It is a gripping thriller, but it's also about life and love." According to Joan Smith in the Sunday Times, it's "no conventional crime novel but a compelling work that crosses literary genres … The result is bold, touching and hugely memorable.

Joanna Rakoff has received warm reviews for her memoir My Salinger Year, about working in a fusty New York literary agency, the firm who represented JD Salinger. Suzanne Berne in the New York Times called it "breezy", and commented that the real star of the book is "the Agency itself, with its Dictaphones and fox stoles, its wistful attempts to cling to the days of "Thin Man movies and steamship travel" by fending off the technological revolution and uncouth commercialisation … Even Rakoff's vintage outfits evoke a kinder, gentler, pre-twerking era." Jane Shilling in the Daily Telegraph was caught up in it, too: "Who knows what Salinger, so fiercely protective of his own seclusion, would have thought of his role as the trellis around which this graceful, rather elusive fragment of memoir twines its elegant prose?"

John Sutherland in the Times reckoned Mr Mercedes by Stephen King, a rare venture for the horror author into hard-boiled crime, is "as good as anything he's previously done" – a return to form after the decline following the author's serious car crash. "I put off as long as I decently could reading the last 10 pages because I wanted to prolong the anticipatory excitement of not knowing whether it was going to be a sting-in-the-tail ending … or one of those morally complicated last scenes as in The Dead Zone. Enough to say, Mr Mercedes goes out not with one bang, but several — all satisfyingly unexpected." But his was a lone voice. For Katie Law in the Evening Standard, the novel, which begins with a "straightforwardly nasty psychopath" piling a Mercedes into a crowd, is "a bit limp". James Kidd in the Independent was more forthright: "The plot is, essentially, a two-hander between a hero and villain who emerge like photocopies of other people's sharper ideas … Whatever mystery and velocity this game of cat-and-mouse generates is hampered by King's exhaustive establishment of his fictional world. This basically means endless brand names, overlong explanations of everything … and conversational longueurs that Karl Ove Knausgaard would dismiss as tedious. The real drawback, however, is King's prose … At its worst, it is a twee mish-mash of folk wisdom and contemporary jargon."